I'd love to hear with this citizen thinks his sign means. Or, for that matter, what any of these Randroid noodniks mean by Atlas "shrugging."

Does it mean "perform a gesture of bafflement or indifference"? Does it mean "force off one's shoulders"? And whichever they choose, what does THAT mean? That the "producers" who carry the world on their shoulders (uh-huh) put it down? Is that who this clown is defending, or on whose behalf he's issuing a warning to the rest of us?

Is he saying, "Be nice to our rich people, or the world will stop working"?

This chapter is killing me. One souless passage after the other, a rape fantasy, and a bunch of magical engineering. Did you know that if you conbined a truss and an arch, you could hold up four trains with a few pieces of metal, and it would cost less than a concrete pipe?

My own favorite line from that chapter was this (describing Rearden's in-her-late-twenties secretary / lieutenant Gwen Ives)

".. whose quietly harmonious impenetrable face had a quality matching the best-designed office equipment; she was one of his most ruthlessly competent employees; her manner of performing her duties suggested the kind of rational cleanliness that would consider any element of emotion, while at work, as an unpardonable immorality"

There you have it - in one run on sentence punctuated by semicolons: it is not merely wrong; it is immoral to show any empathy towards your customers and clients.

Kind of puts the whole MBS debacle in its proper perspective, doesn't it?

Not only that, cynic, but a person could get a Ph.D. in deviant psychology writing about Rand's use of "clean" as a lauditory adjective and, worse, "cleanliness" as a noun, in A.S. I'm not saying it hints at an obsession with what a Freudian might call anal expulsiveness. But I'm not saying it doesn't.